Adaptive bit rate streaming is a technique used in streaming multimedia over networks. It involves detecting a user device's effective network bandwidth and processing capacity in real time, and adjusting the quality of a multimedia stream accordingly. A server, for example, may store a single multimedia stream at various bit rates. The user device may select between streaming the different encodings depending on available resources. As a result, adaptive bit rate streaming can be supported by servers with relatively simple functionality and can be used for both high bit rate and low bit rate connections.